Registrar of Voters office: Missing cards, gossip and deputy fired

Published 9:02 pm, Sunday, June 6, 2010

BRIDGEPORT -- There is no shortage of drama in the city's Registrar of Voters Office.

What started out as an investigation into a missing voter registration card a few months ago ultimately led to the unveiling of 50 voter registration cards stashed away in a desk drawer for years.

Republican Registrar of Voters Joseph Borges said he called an office meeting in late April to discuss the party affiliation change of part-time machine technician Jose Morales' from unaffiliated to Republican.

Borges said he was concerned that Deputy Republican Registrar Theresa Pavia had changed Morales' voter affiliation in order for the technician to qualify as her deputy chief if Pavia is elected to the position of Republican registrar in November.

Pavia, who makes roughly $48,000 a year as deputy registrar, won her party's nomination last month for the position Borges plans to vacate once his term ends. Borges, who earns an annual salary of about $63,000, said former party chair Linda Grace has taken out petitions to challenge Pavia.

At the office meeting, however, both Borges and Pavia's attorney Max Rosenberg claim gossip interfered with the meeting's objective. "He (Borges) said he heard she heard he said she wouldn't make a good Republican registrar," Rosenberg said, speaking for his client because she was still "emotional" about the incident.

Borges said he confronted Pavia because he wanted to clear up rumors that the office staff had been gossiping about her. "She said `I don't care if anybody here likes me or not,' " Borges said.

The Republican registrar then responded by firing his deputy, whom he had appointed four years earlier upon his election to the position. "I let her go because of her attitude and her saying I disliked her," he said. "I don't need anybody watching my back who doesn't trust me."

Rosenberg said his client told him she thinks she was fired not because of the argument but because an hour prior to the meeting she had given Borges paperwork requesting time off under the Federal Medical Leave Act because her husband is ill. Borges claimed he never saw the paperwork.

Before Pavia left the office, though, she dropped a bombshell. She presented both Borges and Democratic Registrar Santa Ayala a manila envelope containing 50 voter registration cards that she said contained errors made by Ayala and had been sitting in her desk drawer for years.

None of the cards, which by law should have been filed away properly, were duplicates. Some of the cards -- a mixture of Republican, Democratic and unaffiliated -- dated as far back as five years ago and had been filled out by a number of different staffers, including former registrars Lisa Parziale and George Comer.

"I was flabbergasted," Ayala said. "It came out of the blue. Why she was keeping them or whether they were mine was irrelevant to me. We went back and made sure these people were in the system. The cards are now filed where they should be."

Although the Secretary of State's oOffice was notified of the hidden cards, the city's registrars decided not to contact the State Elections Enforcement Commission because it was determined none of the voters had been denied the right to vote because of the missing cards.

As for Morales' missing registration card, that still hasn't turned up. Rosenberg declined to comment on the Morales issue, citing no knowledge of that situation.

Morales, reached by phone Thursday, said he personally made the decision to change his party affiliation in February because as a long-time Republican he wanted to vote in the upcoming primaries.

The technician, who has held his city job since 2007, said he became unaffiliated last year because his job required it. He said if Pavia were elected he would be interested in becoming her deputy registrar.